An electric, water or natural gas utility company may manage hundreds of thousands or millions of metering devices located at customer sites. Such meters measure utility consumption and may be considered endpoints in a network, which may be configured as an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) for automated meter reading (AMR). In many situations, utility companies bill their customers monthly, quarterly, or even yearly. In such instances, the utility company may monitor the customers' meters to measure their resource consumption relatively infrequently. For instance, if a utility company bills their customers monthly, it may be sufficient for the utility to obtain a few or even a single meter reading during the billing cycle. However, in some instances utilities may wish to obtain more frequent or timely meter readings for at least some of their customers.
To achieve timelier meter readings, the utility may simply instruct an endpoint associated with each meter in the AMI network to broadcast or “bubble up” its resource consumption data more often. However, increasing the frequency with which endpoints broadcast their resource consumption data will increase the power needs of the endpoints, resulting in shorter battery life for battery powered endpoints. Additionally, more frequent broadcasts are likely to result in more collisions between broadcasts, particularly in narrow band networks which make use of a single fixed radio frequency or a limited range or band of radio frequencies. Collisions are likely to become even more prevalent and problematic in congested networks or those networks serving a relatively large number of densely located endpoints. In such circumstances, increasing the frequency at which endpoints broadcast resource consumption data simply may not be an option.